Applying clipping mask in Adobe Illustrator CS6

Adobe Illustrator is a very interesting and powerful tools that you can do a lots with
when it comes to design, But as a beginner there are basic techniques you need to
understand as you progress on the path of becoming a professional Graphic designer or
Illustrator and one of the is clipping mask.

There are lots of hidden techniques that you need to get familiar with when designing
with illustrator and one of them is power Clipping or Clipping mask.

In this tutorial we are using Adobe Illustrator CS6 to clip and image in a path.

To start, we first have to open our Illustrator CS6 on our computer, I will assume you are
familiar with Adobe Illustrator interface already as we proceed. Therefore Open your
software located on your computer, I don’t know where you have your software’s shortcut
but here is my desktop task-bar.

Illustsrator on desktop taskbar

Now I click on Illustrator Icon or logo on my task-bar, that is the lower part of my
desktop as shown in the screenshot below, wait till your software done loading, once your
interface is ready then click on FILE at the upper left hand corner, Click NEW to open
working area called Artboard in Illustrator. We don’t actually need a specific dimension for
this tutorial purpose , just click OK below and your work space or Artboard is opened
then we begin.

clipping mask
Adobe Illustrator CS6 Interface

clipping mask

What we are going to work on here is an Image, we want to Clip or apply a clipping mask on an Image with a rectangular
path, after clipping then we do some few editing on the in which image is clipped, and
few editing on image as well.

Now Let us bring in our image by clicking FILE menu once again, then scroll down on all
the option and click on PLACE. The image we are using for this tutorial is located in MY
PICTURE Folder on my computer., I select the Image and clip OPEN.

clipping mask
Image imported or Place in the Art board

Now i have my image displaying on my work-space or Art board, as displays in the screenshot
above. You will notice that the image is bigger that or Art board, Now I want to make a
path that is the same size of my Art board right on top of our chosen image , See the
Screenshot below.

Rectangular Path selected

Now go to your MENU on Illustrator CS6, Click on SELECT, the click on SELECT ALL or you
can also click on the rectangular path then press SHIFT on window PC or ALT on Mac then
select the image all together, then go back to your software menu above, click on OBJECT,
check all the options down and click on CLIPPING MASK or rather press CTRL+7 or (CMD +7
on Mac) on your keypad and you see you image clipped in the rectangle path.

path selected
Rectangular path and Image selected together

Note that you can clip anything in illustrator whether image or vector into a path in
Adobe illustrator CS6.

Clipping object in a path is not the end, you can also edit both the path and the content, whereas the content is the image clipped in the path.

To edit the path and the content(image) what you do is double click on the path, then
click again, that is meant to separate the path and the image for easy editing, if you
drag the path, you notice the image is also get dragged in-proportionately and get the
image deformed. So once you double click and on it there will be separation in layers and
editing can be easily done .

clipping-image clipped
Image clipped in rectangular path

You can decided to apply color to the path , see the screenshot below:

clipping mask
Color added to path while the opacity of the image reduced to 50%

and you can also reduce the opacity of the image or content so that the color applied on
the path can be visible.



Author: marvelcmedia
We are an experienced WordPress, Frontend , Web developer, Creative designer and Digital Marketer.

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